E-commerce technology enables consumers to purchase items of merchandise on-line, from web sites that act as virtual stores. Pioneers of e-commerce include Amazon.com, Inc. of Seattle, Wash., eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif., and Shop.com of Monterey, Calif. E-commerce technology combines on-line catalogue ingest, browsing and search, inventory management, purchase and payment transactions, automated payment processing, and other components within a comprehensive e-commerce server.
The growth of the Internet as a medium for consumer marketing has led to terrific growth of product and service offerings. One direction of this growth has been in the expansion from single vendor e-commerce sites that act as virtual stores, to multi-vendor e-commerce sites that act as virtual shopping malls. The virtual shopping mall provides a single integrated web site where consumers can purchase goods and services from a wide diversity of merchants. Multi-vendor e-commerce web sites are able to incorporate features of single vendor sites, and have the potential of offering features beyond those offered on single vendor sites.
A growing feature of single vendor and multi-vendor web sites, which has proven to be a substantial source of revenue, is the commerce of gift giving. The expansion of web sites from single vendor to multi-vendor provides opportunities for extending traditional models of gift giving that have not yet been realized. In addition, traditional e-commerce gifts are limited to unilateral actions taken by a gift giver that do not necessarily take into consideration tastes, preferences or physical characteristics of a gift recipient.
There is thus a need for designs and implementations of gift-giving technologies, which allow gift recipients to have flexibility in selecting items that are meaningful, useful and enjoyable to them, while still adhering to constraints, such as cost, prescribed by the gift giver.